The invention relates to the technical sector of automatically cutting appliances for the dispensing of wiping materials of the absorbent-paper type for hand-wipe, toilet-paper, wiping and general cleaning applications.
The applicant has developed numerous appliances of this type which conventionally comprise a housing, a cowl and a drum with an integrated cutting blade, the said blade being capable of emerging from the drum during operation by virtue of means for the triggering and return of the drum. Lateral flanges of the housing are arranged so as to support the reel of material which either comes to bear directly on the drum, according to the teaching of the patent FR 2.322.215, or comes into a plane above the drum without contact with the latter, as, for example, in the embodiment described in the patent FR 2.799.946. In this specific embodiment, a pressing roll is capable of ensuring pressure on the strip of material at a given location in addition to a second pressure zone defined towards the cutting zone of the strip of material in the region of the drum. Thus, the loading reel can be mounted either so as to bear on the drum receiving the cutting mechanism or in a plane above the drum and without contact with the latter. These various types of appliance, in their basic concept and with various arrangements, are in widespread use by the applicant throughout the world through his licensees.
The applicant has thus developed another automatically cutting appliance for the dispensing of wiping material, which is simplified in terms of its implementation and which is the subject of the patent FR No. 2.828.084. Briefly, the appliance comprises a basic housing with a bottom face and a lower face with a lid, the said housing receiving removably, by snapping, a cartridge defining a carrier structure comprising two transverse lateral flanges, a connecting plate arranged between the flanges and a front spacer bar. The flanges, in their upper part, receive connectors supporting the reel of material and, in their lower part, receive two drums arranged side by side, without direct contact between them, the first drum being the blade-carrying drum and the second being the guide drum, the said drums being arranged, at one of their mutually confronting ends, so as to receive toothed rings making it possible to connect them and to rotate them in relation to one another. Moreover, the blade-carrying drum is arranged with a third toothed ring cooperating with the mechanism for triggering the rotation of the drums, including a fixed cam. This blade-carrying arm of the cutting device includes a movable blade which cooperates with the abovementioned fixed cam, at the same time defining the path of the cutting blade. This specific appliance includes a template for ensuring the setting of the format of the strip of material to be dispensed, either by a previous change of pinion or by the use of a sliding pinion displaceable in order, depending on the position, to cooperate with such and such a gearwheel, in particular by virtue of an arrangement of the drum. The said sliding pinion is associated with a projecting index tongue mounted on the movable shaft supporting the sliding pinion and so as to be displaced previously by the operator. This requires a prior setting of the format by the operator, with the appliance being opened.
The applicant has also worked on devices for selecting the format of the strip of material to be dispensed on other appliances. A proposed solution thus involved opening the drum slightly by the relative spacing apart of its half-parts.
Although, in principle, the idea of an automatically cutting material-dispensing appliance allowing format selection is known, the applicant but also the other companies currently in the market of wiping material dispensing appliances have not succeeded in implementing this type of concept for economic reasons associated with the manufacturing cost of the mechanisms, for reasons of more or less easy practical use and handling and due to a lack of reliability.
Furthermore, the dimensional format ratios proposed in the various research projects conducted hitherto to the applicant's knowledge, both by himself and through what has been published, have been insufficient to maintain and justify an interest in pursuing the said research projects.
In practice, too, each proposed solution was intrinsic to one type of appliance.